I am an entrepreneur and communications expert from Salt Lake City, founder of Snapp Conner PR, and author of Beyond PR: Communicate Like A Champ The Digital Age, available at http://amzn.to/1AO0PxX. I am also a frequent author and speaker on Business Communication. The opinions I express (especially when tongue in cheek) are entirely my own. My newsletter is the Snappington Post, available at http://bit.ly/1iv67Wk

Bandwagon Marketing: How Leading Brands Turn Perception Into Reality

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew.

In today’s world of social media, blogging, online marketing, PR and SEO, the all powerful ‘eye-ball’ of the consumer is the Holy Grail. So what does your company look like in the eyes consumers? And how does bandwagon marketing play a role in that view? Let’s take a look:

Michael Beck, Marketing Consultant and Sr. Manager at Chicago Sun-Times says: “There are several great applications where the bandwagon effect plays a role.” In e-commerce, reviews and ratings can have a significant influence on conversion. A 5 star review by itself means nothing, but an average 4/5 stars from 1000 reviewers can easily sway a purchase decision.

In the social realm, it becomes progressively easier to acquire subscribers/fans/followers as your base grows. A large group of supporters automatically adds credibility to a business or a personality. It has a documented effect on SEO and SERP rankings as well.

GrouponGroupon is a great example of the “bandwagon effect”. Deals that pick up steam tend to accelerate even faster as the “bought” numbers increase. In fact the product needs to achieve a certain level of “bandwagon effect” before the deal itself becomes active.

Bandwagon effects are most applicable in the digital marketing arena, where the actions of audience peers are most visible. The crowd appeal or virality of your promotion correlates directly to the exposure you get on FacebookFacebook, in Twitter, and in GoogleGoogle search.

The bandwagon effect is so valuable there are entire industries now emerging to increase social signals artificially. Some marketers purchase fake reviews, fake Facebook fans, and fake Twitter followers. Just recently the press exposed that a great proportion of Mitt Romney’s Twitter followers during the recent election were purchased, and the social following of teen star Justin Bieber (and many other celebrities) have been exposed as being largely padded with fakes.

Collaborator Adam Torkildson is initiating a research project on bandwagon marketing

Sadly, most consumers don’t know the difference. Even more significantly, a recent university study shows a positive correlation (by a factor of 2 or more) between the propensity for a person to click the “like” button on a post where they see more than a handful of likes are already there.

Without necessarily knowing why it works, marketing strategist Robin Pisciotta says, “Adding social media share buttons (with counters) to webinar registration pages and sales pages gives prospects the feeling that all the people who’ve shared the page are users of the product or registrants to the webinar. We have increased our webinar opt-in conversion rates by 38% simply by adding social sharing buttons with counters.”

Marketing guru Ali Maadelat has noted the impact of bandwagon mentality as well: “The Asch Conformity Experiments showed subjects would say two obviously different lines were the same length when others in a group said they were.”

Asch’s study involved only a handful of people, but researchers such as Professor Cait Lamberton, Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh, are now beginning to look at the phenomena of bandwagon behavior on a much larger scale. Lamberton is currently working with a PhD student on a project to see how people respond to a product or an idea that has a large social following.

What she’s found so far is interesting: there is a segment of the population that doesn’t differentiate between many or few ‘likes’. This effect has a name: susceptibility to interpersonal influence. The sheer numbers of likes or reviews don’t necessarily matter to this segment so long as they can see that at least someone has liked the product or reviewed it positively. Interestingly, the segment of the population that is most susceptible to bandwagon influence is young males, although their imperviousness progressively increases with age. The final results of Professor Lamberton’s study will be available sometime in 2013, and I will cover it here.

When you start to wonder how social influence may be impacting your business, the phenomena of bandwagon marketing is certainly providing an answer. However it will be vital to arrive at increasingly accurate metrics around the power this influence can hold on purchase decisions in time. What have your own experiences been with bandwagon marketing so far? I welcome your thoughts.Additional reporting for this article was provided by Adam Torkildson, Sr. Associate for Snapp Conner PR, who is currently launching a research study with Professor Jeff Ely of Northwestern University on social media and the bandwagon effect. Author: Cheryl Conner | Google+

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What a great article – as someone just trying to start out an online business this knowledge comes in very handy – I guess all the time spent on social networking ladders and promoting the shop online is worth its weight!

Fake followers or reviews are very bad. They aren’t from real people and they don’t get you any where. Most people think that there is value in numbers; however, the value lies in quality rather than quantity.